Showing results by narrator "Paul McGann" in All Categories

Olly's brother, Matt, has always wanted to be a clown, and when he sees the plight of Africa's children, he makes the decision to fly the family nest to take his skill to a place devoid of laughter. To his family, it is a travesty: this bright, intelligent boy with a glowing future ups and leaves to head into the unknown, leaving behind him a trail of worry and feelings of impending doom. Olly is charged with the care of a family of starlings that she and her brother have been watching over in the garden....

Stretching from the moon all the way to the South Pole, follow the boy and the penguin on their adventures as they reach for the stars and try to fly away. This spectacular collection of four much-loved modern classics includes How to Catch a Star, Lost and Found, The Way Back Home, and Up and Down.

There once was a boy…and one day a penguin arrives on his doorstep. The boy decides the penguin must be lost and tries to return him. But no one seems to be missing a penguin. So the boy decides to take the penguin home himself, and they set out in his row boat on a journey to the South Pole. But when they get there, the boy discovers that maybe home wasn't what the penguin was looking for after all…

From the author of the best-selling Forgotten Voices of the Great War comes a final look at the last 21 living British veterans of the First World War. These interviews, conducted in 2004, will never be repeated, as the youngest was 106 years old, and most are now gone. These first-person accounts follow the young soldiers from their homes throughout Britain to the raging battles while in the service of the Royal Field Artillery, Black Watch, Royal Navy, and others.

India, 1803. It is four years since Richard Sharpe earned his sergeant's stripes at the siege of Seringapatam, and four years in which Sharpe seems to have discovered the easiest billet in the British army. But that comfort is rudely shattered when he witnesses a murderous act of treachery by an English officer who has defected from the East India Company to join the mercenary army of the Mahratta Confederation commanded by the flamboyant Hanoverian, Anthony Pohlmann.

Danny has only one dream - football, but he's useless at it. Danny, though, has allies - his teacher Miss Gilby and Chris, who adopted him as a challenge and who is the school's football hero.

Equally courageous, equally deadly, the British mercenaries in Bosnia have a story to tell, but a story without official blessing. War Dogs follows the fortunes of a gang of eight Bosnia mercenaries, a mixed bunch, old and cynical, young and naive, mean and psychotic, including two idealists; the rest just in it for the money.

Colonel Leroux answered to no man save the Emperor. With exquisite delicacy he could skin a man alive in search of the secrets he held; a parole given in "honour" was a means to an end. From the first moment Richard Sharpe came across the Frenchman he mistrusted him...and lusted after the sword Leroux had killed so many times with. But at each encounter the Colonel escaped Sharpe with almost contemptuous ease.

It is 1807 and Sharpe, back from India and Trafalgar, has joined the newly formed Greenjackets, but his career is in ruins, and his future in the army apparently hopeless.

It is 1803, and closing on the retreating Mahrattas in western India is Sir Arthur Wellesley's army and with it Ensign Richard Sharpe, newly commissioned but wishing he had stayed a sergeant. Spurned by his new regiment, he is sent to the army's baggage train and there finds corruption, romance, treason, and enemies old and new, including the murderous Sergeant Hakeswill who has powerful friends, while Sharpe's only ally is an orphaned Arab boy.

In the winter of 1811, the war seems lost. All Spain has fallen to the French, except for Cadiz which is now the Spanish capital and is under siege. Wellington and his British army are in Portugal, waiting for spring to spark the war to life again. Richard Sharpe and his company are part of a small expeditionary force sent to break a bridge across the River Guadiana.

There once was a boy who loved stars so much that he wished he had one of his very own. Every night he watched the stars in the sky from his bedroom window and dreamed of how he could be their friend and how they could play hide-and-go-seek together. So, one day, he decided to set about catching a star of his very own.

It is 1809 and Lieutenant Sharpe, who belongs to a small British army that has a precarious foothold in Portugal, is sent to look for Kate Savage, the daughter of an English wine shipper. But before he can discover the missing girl, the French onslaught on Portugal begins and the city of Oporto falls.

It is 1805 and Ensign Richard Sharpe, having secured a reputation as a fighting soldier in India, is on his way home to join the newly formed Green Jackets. The voyage should be a period of rest but his ship is riven with treachery and threatened by a formidable French warship, the Revenant, which is terrorizing British shipping in the Indian ocean. An old opponent of Sharpe's is aboard his ship, and the voyage is further disturbed by the Lady Grace Hale, apparently as unreachable as she is beautiful.

All is quiet on the farm - until Dog starts to SNORE! Cow and Cat and Sheep and Pig and Dog and all the little Piglets are woken by the noise. Will they ever get back to sleep?

This powerful and moving anthology includes poems of war from the 18th century to our own days in the long shadow of the bomb. The poets evoke the glory and the horror, the exhilaration and the despair, the humanity and the insanity of war.

An exciting intergalactic adventure from shining star Oliver Jeffers, creator of Lost and Found. One day a boy finds an aeroplane in his cupboard. Up, up, up and away he flies, high into the sky. Whizzing past clouds, stars and planets until suddenly, he runs out of petrol! Miles from earth, the boy crashes into the moon and waits. Just as he is beginning to get cold and lonely, a friendly Martian appears from the darkness, also with a broken aircraft.

Sharpe's Escape takes place in the summer of 1810, once again in the Peninsular War. The French are mounting their third and most dangerous invasion of Portugal. Captain Richard Sharpe with his company of redcoats and riflemen meets the invaders on the gaunt ridge of Bussaco. But there, despite a stunning British victory, the French are not stopped and the army have to fall back.

The 13th novel in the popular Sharpe series. Once more Sharpe’s career is on the line, following a disastrous attack by an elite French unit. To save his honour Sharpe must lead his men to glory in one of the bitterest battles of the Peninsular War. In the spring of 1811, while quartered in the crumbling Portuguese fort of San Isidro, Richard Sharpe and his men are attacked by an elite French unit commanded by the formidable Brigadier Loup, and suffer heavy losses.